Florian and Rue, as it happened, were very ill-informed as to the Tyrolese minstrel market, otherwise they would certainly never have chosen Meran as a place of refuge for Will Deverill against the pressing temptations of his acquaintance with Linnet. They chose it because it was a delightful and frequented autumn resort; because the climate was charming and the sunshine unfailing; because the grape-cure was then on in full swing in the valley; and because everybody else at Innsbruck that moment was going there. For those very reasons, the wisdom of the serpent might have taught them to avoid it: ’twas the innocence of the dove that led them to fly right into it. In point of fact, Meran is crowded in October and November. High well-born Graf and consumptive plebeian disport themselves all day long on the leafy promenades, eating grapes as they go, beside the band and the Kurhaus. It stands to the world of Berlin and Vienna as Cannes and Mentone to the world of London. That was precisely why Andreas Hausberger had marked it out long since, as the next southward point on their way Riviera-wards.

“Are there many hotels there?” Franz Lindner asked dubiously, much crestfallen at his own comparative failure with the public of Innsbruck. A little of his jauntiness had been washed for the moment out of Franz Lindner’s figure; he looked limper in the back and not so stiff in the neck?—?nay, even his hat stood cocked on his head at a less aggressive angle.

“There isn’t anything else,” Andreas Hausberger answered in his Western style. “Meran and Obermais are one enormous gasthaus. If Linnet does as well as she has done at Innsbruck, it’ll take us take three weeks or a month, at least, to get right through with them. We took a good bit, considering all things, the other evening. I think she draws; I noticed old gentlemen slipped their florins under their palms into the plate unobtrusively. Besides, in a Kurort, she’ll soon get talked about. People at one hotel or pension will speak of us at another?—?‘Seen this Tyrolese troupe going about in the place? Pretty girl; sings sweetly.’ I take it there can’t be less than thirty houses in Meran where we could get an audience. That carries us well on to the end of November. By that time, San Remo and Bordighera’ll be filling up fast, and from there we can go on to Cannes, Nice, Mentone.”

So three days later saw them safe at Meran. To Linnet, that journey from north to south, across the great ridge of the Alps, seemed like transplantation into an earthly fairyland. She had never seen the luscious wealth of vineclad lands before; for North and South Tyrol are two different countries, one cold, bleak, Germanic, the other soft, warm, Italian. Meran itself appeared to her ardent imagination more beautiful than anything eye hath seen or mind conceived of. And, indeed, it is beautiful. Whoever knows it loves it. A brawling little mountain stream, the Passer, rushes headlong from the glaciers of the Otzthaler Alps through a wild upland glen, to join in due time the broader stream of the Adige, which threads the bleak Vintschgau on its precipitous course from the lofty snow-fields of the Ortler and the Wild-Spitze. Near the point where the two unite, on a long tongue of land, the little town of Meran nestles close among its vines, under shelter of the rounded ice-worn Küchelberg. It clings with its ancient walls, its steeples, its watch-towers, as if glued to the lower slopes of the basking mountain. Linnet gazed at it, delighted. For here, on the south side of the Alps, looking down the broad valley to sunny Italy, the vegetation differed greatly, both in richness and in character, from anything she had ever seen in her native Zillerthal. Indeed, even Italy itself, parched as it often is with excessive heat, seldom shows such wild luxuriance of foliage and fruit as these green and well-watered South Tyrolese valleys. There is a bowery, flowery lavishness and lushness about it all that defies description. The vines that trail loose across their trellised archways; the gourds that hang pendent from their wooden frails; the great yellow pumpkins that lean temptingly over every terraced wall; the lizards that bask blinking on the sun-smitten rock-face; the crimson sprays of Virginia creeper that droop in festoons from the brown verandah wood-work of coquettish chalets, mingled with the pine-clad slopes and bare snow-sprinkled peaks of the upper background, make a charming hybrid between Switzerland and Lombardy. Imagine for yourself an ancient German town, with mouldering walls and high turrets, like Boppard or Andernach, and crenellated castles of quaint medi?val architecture, but with arcaded streets and Italian loggias, plumped down incongruously in the midst of this half-Alpine, half-southern scenery, and you get a very fair bird’s-eye view indeed, in its way, of the main traits of Meran.

On the very first morning of her arrival in the town, Linnet took her way out with Franz Lindner and Philippina along the brawling stream that forms the centre and rallying point of the gay little watering-place. Meran is all parade, winter-garden, and band, and they walked through its midst to see and be seen of the lounging Herrschaft. They were dressed in full costume; ’twas a form of advertisement Andreas greatly believed in. Franz held himself erect, with his feather still stuck Robbler-wise, and his defiant air, as he strode through the crowd that lined the promenade?—?the gayest, most varied, and most fashionable throng Linnet had ever set eyes on. He and Philippina stared hard at the world that displayed itself before them. German Jews from Frankfort, great Viennese bankers, the round-faced, engaging Bavarian fr?uleins, the tall and tailor-made English lawn-tennis misses. Linnet gazed at them, too, but cast her eyes now and then from the people and the shops to the great cleft mountain peaks that soared everywhere high and clear-cut into the sky above them.

In the lower part of their walk the river was smooth, and the roadway was bordered by fantastic pensions and quaint Tyrolese buildings; but in the upper part, which they reached beyond a single bold arch of stone-work that spanned the Passer, precipitous rocks began to hem it in, the river assumed the guise of a foaming torrent, and the ruined fortress of the Zenoburg, with its Romanesque portal, frowned down from high above them on a water-worn gorge where the stream forced its way in a dashing cataract. A little platform overhangs the very edge of the cascade. Linnet stood there long, leaning over the iron rail, and gazing with delight at the white foam beneath, and the placid deep green of the calm rock-basin that received the mountain stream as it leapt from the precipice.

Franz and Philippina wouldn’t let her remain there, however. With the restlessness of their kind, they were eager to explore this new world more fully. They strolled through the town, and up the hills behind, where all seemed fresh and southern and romantic to Linnet. Through green alleys of vines, trained like bowers over their heads, they mounted at last by a cloven ravine to the chestnut-covered slopes, where the............